Friday, August 31, 2012

Although I find the edifice of Christian dogma to be quite striking, I have not been so moved by Christian morality, especially in its current trendy form. Rome's recent embrace of European socialism strikes me as no less historically contingent or opportunistic than its earlier embrace of European colonialism or prior to that, European feudalism.

I note that the Catechism of the Catholic Church is structured as an expansive commentary on The Creed, The Ten Commandments and The Lords Prayer. Very traditional.

When it comes to the Seventh Commandment, against stealing, we have an extensive (bloated, inflated, unhinged) discourse on "Catholic Social Teaching". This setting makes Theft the paradigm for bad economic behavior. When the 9th and 10th commandments, against coveting, are discussed, we have hardly any consciousness of the role that envy --of which the Decalogue makes a very big point-- plays in political, social and economic life.

If conservatives are more liable to greed...which the Church now likes to see as theft, although they are quite different moral animals...then liberals are certainly more liable to envy. But to this deep and destructive passion, driving so much of what passes for justice and equality politics, Rome has chosen to show disinterest, and fails to notice its architectonic power.

It was, and is, fashionable to dismiss Catholic morality as sex-obsessed, what was contemned as "pubic theology". Now its additional obsession with an even more complex and contestatious subject it knows even less about is supposed to be some kind of noble revelatory breakthrough. If I hear a bishop or nun say "the poor and vulnerable" one more time, I'm gonna p...e. To the extent that any Church teaching is based on natural knowledge, to that extent it must respect that knowledge. No? Math, biology...and economics are not proper realms of episcopal oversight. Sexual ethics can't be based on ignorance of or outright error about human biology. Pontificating --and that words is perfectly apt here-- about how the economy ought to be can't be based on errors about how it actually is.

Few discussions are as likely to provide examples of absolute assurance based on complex and shifting data than What Causes Homosexuality?

Twin studies show that there is a genetic component, at least in the people it studied, but it is not infallible. Not surprising, given the complexity of genetics.

And, in one of my few agreements with postmodern lingo, I suspect that talking of homosexualities rather than a monolithic homosexuality is useful, and that a single mechanism may be the wrong question.

Besides, as Charles Tripp remarked many years ago, --and I think it's still true--who really knows what causes heterosexuality?

All I know is that I have never known any other kind of erotic inclination. My very few attempts to try such a connection with a woman left me completely unmoved.

Ran across this quote from The Character of Nations* (1997) by Angelo Codevilla. It precisely describes how PC works.

“The regime rules more by fashion — strict, pervasive, unforgiving of nuance — than by statute. It defines itself by icons and taboos.”

Departures from Received Wisdom and What Decent (White) People Think (now almost entirely run by Gramscian PC) are reacted to in exactly the same way as a grievous fashion faux pas. Like walking into a Marin county cocktail party in a leisure suit, with a mullet. The judgment and rejection instantaneous and complete. The grounds for it just as herdishly empty.

Not a single Republican seems to understand that half the country, including many of the crucial undecided voters who are mostly female, are against the Republicans because they see them as racist white men. As long as the Republicans continue to ignore that belief, as long as they fail to confront it and show its evil and falsity, they will continue to look guilty to those voters and they will probably lose.

But they will, of course, never confront it. Because they think that to think of yourself as a white person, let alone to defend yourself as a white person from false racism charges made against you as a white person, is itself racist. The Republicans thus continue to inhabit their race-blind dream world, while half the country sees them as guilty white men.

Dirty Harry was very very funny. Kinda nice, but mostly blunt and boldly rude. I am sure his Talking Chair routine with Obama will be seen as racist. Zzzzzz.

Rubio's a good speaker. Romney is very...Mormon. Nice, decent. And like Ryan, seems genuinely optimistic. I supposed a bit of the pandering to women is political necessity nowadays. Hope he wins. As you know...Howdy Doody.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

more advanced than myself sometimes come up with ideas that match mine. So I post them.

One Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian political theorist, holds that fascism and communism are dead and that liberalism is in crisis. He posits a fourth polity based not on the individual, the class, the state or the race, but on....Dasein.

My doctoral thesis was partly on Martin Heidegger, and I have no idea what that means. But then it is obvious to me that I have gotten dumber with age. Things I used to think I understood now make much less, if any, sense to me.

But Dugin does point out (via screen caps from his video) that liberalism is in crisis.

From a review of a film about the destruction of the White farmers in Zimbabwe:

Human beings don’t strive for money and food. They strive for power. Africa was far wealthier under European imperial control than it is now, but Africans don’t want wealth as much as they want sovereignty. Detroit would be far more prosperous with some White technocrat instead of Kwame Kilpatrick, but Detroit’s urban Blacks are smarter than White Americans. They realize something we don’t: It’s better to starve with freedom than feast in submission. Mugabe’s assuredly a miserable thug, but he’s their miserable thug.

Throughout the movie, the family desperately appeals to their White cultural traditions, insisting on their universality. According to decades-old government records, they have a lawful right to keep their farm, but what are “rights”, “laws”, and “justice” when those in power have no use for them? And why should they? Western values enable White supremacy. Zimbabweans—being less intelligent and educated—will never win if they play by the White man’s rules. They’ll win by playing to their strengths: brutality, terror, and superior numbers.

Two points. As Ex Cathedra has known, defining liberalism's goal as creating a new dominant group with the power, resources and status of the vanquished group, group status is as driving a motivator as money, even a greater one. Materialism is blind to this deep human drive, especially in males. Men's personal status is rooted in their groups' status. It's what our Founding Fathers meant by ambition.

And any group will try to privilege its own strengths. For Whites --when they had the power and the self-confidence to back them up-- it's rules and principles and law. For people like the Zimbabweans, who have neither the aptitude nor the attraction for that, it's their strengths: "brutality, terror and superior numbers."

The author concludes about The Most Foolish People On The Planet (C)

We as a people are too abstract, idealistic, and removed from our instincts to act in our tribal interests in the same way other populations do. If anything, the more trials we experience, the more resolved we become in our folly. This doesn’t mean we’re doomed. It’s actually liberating. We don’t need to sit around and wait for things to get bad enough for our people to rise up. What we need to do is adopt a new set of principles and our people will pursue them with the crusading zeal we Whites manifest when stirred by an abstract ideal.

Once a week I have breakfast at a local cafe. This morning, on entering, I heard, then saw, a Black female, sitting with two Black friends, loudly arguing with...well, yelling at...two men at a table near them. The guys were gay, but I couldn't tell if they were White or Latino.

She was yelling about their "little racist comments" that had disrupted her breakfast. And she was "a woman of God." The staff, a white waiter and the Brazilian woman owner did nothing.

Blacks Behaving Badly, Part 3,322,766.

I left.

One of the more impolitic blogs I read has a shorthand acronym it uses, BRA. This stands for Black-Run America. On first reading, it sounds silly. How can a 13% minority --most of whom are hardly in positions of power-- "run" America.

But, Voltaire's Razor points to why. No one would engage the bitch because they knew that a) it would likely escalate and b) when it's a Black vs White confrontation like that, nowadays we know who 'de raciss' is gonna be.

That woman is losing them business, but they were too afraid, or smart, to engage her.

To discover who your true masters are, find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

Genesis 13: 8-9.

UPDATE: I ran into the waiter this afternoon. Turns out that one of the two guys asked the waiter about the fried chicken, saying that a Black friend of his told him it was good. Then Miss Africa Woman of God overheard and exploded.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Watching some of the Republican Convention. The delegates and audience are massively White, although there seem to be at least as many women as men.
As Ex Cathedra has explained, the Republicans are the feckless and half-assed party of White America.

They drag out a Latino, a Black, now an Indian (Haley)....it's not gonna work, boys and girls. Little POC's to give some kind of moral sanction to this otherwise criminal gathering of Caucasians. Sad. The way the game is played, the Republicans are the party of the White racist bigoted Christians. Nothing they can say or do will change that role, given to them by the liberal media. It certainly does not benefit the Democrats to let them off that multyculty hook.

The way the smug tenured faces of NPR asked Gingrich about this made me want to reach behind the screen and smack the bitches.

Blacks and Latinos --with the possible exception of Cubans-- are tribal collectivists to the core. Democrats are the Party of the Aggrieved: gays, Jews*, the wymyn on whom the Republicans are apparently waging a war, etc. And they need a Villain, which role White America fills very nicely and which The Government is her to fix.

*Jews, (who are supposed to be extra smart) when it comes to politics, revert to shtetl herd instinct. Despite the fact that their beloved Negroes despise them, their paranoia about Christians --in the Christian country which has been of unparallelled benevolence to them-- trumps everything and they vote Democrat at rates that would make sheep proud. I have found my traditional philoSemitic attitudes sorely tried of late; the Chomsky-Zinn theme of Jewish ingratitude.

As I wrote some time ago:

Item three: (And this is the strongest by far for me). Jews in America, especially, who adopt a leftwing or progressive stance which makes the very country that has welcomed them the source of all the world's evils and do what they can to damage it. The ikon here is Noam Chomsky. Or Howard Zinn or Saul Alinsky. The ACLU and its war on Christianity. But Hollywood Jews and the armies of Jews on the left are included. What makes this different from my dislike of leftists generally is that I deem it a special case of ingratitude approaching betrayal. What other Western country has been as welcoming to Jews as America? To be an anti-American Jew pushes deep and dark buttons in me.

The expressed motives and available contexts and modes of battle change a lot, but the "deep structure" of group conflict seems to be constant.

Calls to unity and peace and love need to be taken with a huge mine of salt...since most groups which espouse those values get themselves --often very enthusiastically-- into conflict with groups who don't buy what they're selling.

One of the lies of liberalism is that group conflict can be overcome by benevolent attitudes or talking. Especially when the conflict is with a Victim Group, the very idea that there is a win/lose conflict going on makes liberals have panic attacks.

As Dean Inge said:

It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion.

Expecting group conflict among humans to cease is not much different from expecting lion prides or wolf packs to coalesce into big leonine/lupine love-fests.

In the usual link to link to link way that my mind, and the internet, works, I thought of Gregory Baum, an old prof of mine at the University of Toronto. Very liberal, wrote a book I was very influenced by in the 70's, Man Becoming, ...although when I actually had a seminar with him, his nastiness and dictatorial style --not uncommon among professors, liberals especially-- required that I make a big distinction between the book and its author.

In an interview, he says:

I am a person of the left, I am surrounded by left-wing social and political scientists, and I am in touch with active members of left-wing political parties in Canada and Quebec. What amazes me is the profound ethical commitment of my friends, their selflessness, their concern for others, their generosity and their compassion with the disadvantaged and marginalized. Yet when I ask them where their values come from, they don’t know.

It is the groundlessness of so much of this that amazes me of late. These people would cringe at the notion of apolitical "nature" or "reason", or even more at the idea of traditional or revealed values...but when it comes to saying where their grand plans for the rectification of the universe come from...silence.

Community is one of the most overused words with the least meaning. Of many such. When I was in religious life, it was a tiresome fetish phrase. Now in the larger world, it is ubiquitous and empty. "Join the Google community..."

In regard to the LGBTQ "community", I have for several years now preferred to think of us/them as "a demographic with issues."

The mornings have been a bit chilly the last few days, grey and foggy. Harbingers of fall. But we have our regular built-in Indian Summer in SF, September, to look forward to. Often the nicest month of the year.

My friend WH, a really nice guy in practice, carries a dark view of life and of humanity. Makes me seem Pollyanna by comparison. Occurred to me the other day that he has nursed a deep resentment his whole life against...reality. His roiling outrage at what he considers injustice --sometimes good people suffer and bad people succeed-- is based on a vision of the world that is completely impossible. Sorta like being furious for decades and decades that 2+2 does not equal 5. He's a One with, thank God, a strong Two wing. A shame. Aside from his kindness and intellectual curiosity, one thing I like about him is that his contradictions make mine, by comparison, seem less incoherent.

Jude Law's very Alpha-ish Sidekick to Holmes

Something about the later Victorian era, as fictionalized in Sherlock Holmes, really attracts me. Even though I know enough about it to realize that I would have been pretty uncomfortable much of the time, on several levels, there's a definite appeal. The combination of high energy and strong restriction in a story, or a culture, has always fascinated me. It may also be that this was one of the last moments when Western man was self-confident.

Saturday, August 25, 2012

For firing John Derbyshire over his inconvenient truths about racial groups, National Review editor Rich Lowry has taken a lot of lumps from the farther Right.

This is a particularly charming lambast.

The most recent highlight is an indignant whine scribbled by perennial pubescent Rich Lowry, whose cherubic and innocent visage matches his political sophistication but conceals the reality that he’s a 44 year old man.

Lowry has never written anything of lasting importance, and his prose has not graduated from the conservatism by the numbers style taught by Beltway Right institutions to socially maladjusted college students. By aping Republican talking points and taking care never to dwell into forbidden territory, they can guarantee at least some form of a living in the American Right’s own unique form of affirmative action.

Proudly, avowedly, unabashedly, Lowry knows the role of American conservatives – to be good losers so they can argue with lesbians like Rachel Maddow.

that HBCU means Historically Black College or University
and that
PWI means Predominantly White Institution?

I found out from a commentor....insensitive blocking mine.

I do not like this at all. I am bias being a HBCU graduate myself, Tennessee State alumni. It amazes me how the PWI are capable of attracting so much wealth (outside of Division 1 football, which, brings a lot of revenue) in comparison to HBCUs. The cumulative wealth of all HBCUs combined is a small percentage of the wealth of only a few top PWIs. This country should be ashamed at its self for allowing such a disparity. It reminds me of the financial worth gap between Blacks and Whites. It is time for the status quo to change.

Friday, August 24, 2012

Apparently Black Muslims are not as virtuous as they'd have us believe.

"Ain't not one o' you dumb*.
You juss low-down!"

Allahu akbar.

*This is the classic trick of a preacher or an orator: captatio benevolentiae. You get a crowd to listen to you by flattering them somehow, usually with a lie like that. (Really, what do you guess the average IQ is in that room?) Then you tell them the truth you want them to know.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

...Western thinkers’ ceaseless attempt to explain uniquely Islamic beliefs and institutions in non-Islamic terms expresses the essence of liberalism, which is to deny the existence of human differences that really matter.

My thought of late, that liberalism induces a kind of trance, which disables the ability to use common sense and to see what is actually in front of you.

If indeed the Roman Church ever decided to ordain female deacons, we know, of course, from contemporary history, that they would be grateful for that, accept their exclusion from the presbyteral and episcopal orders, and never use it as a beachhead to continue to drive their feminism into the heart of the priesthood and try to transform a 2000 year old religion into a day care center. Never.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Reading the FB profile of a French woman who commented next to me, I was reminded of some lines from Jung's Vision Seminars in the 1930's. He appreciated the feminine, but he was no feminist.

Her self description (translation mine):

A whole person, frank, sincere, impulsive (some-times wrongly), caring, protective, playful, heart on sleeve, one who listens to the other, is ready to help, detests hypocrisy, malice, mockery and violence in all its forms, a fighter, but hugely sensitive and fragile, a proud Northerner. Situation: divorced and happy to be free.

The Democrat party's driving values and programs respond repetitively and instinctively, even compulsively, to 1. women of the feminist kind (and their friends the gays), 2. Blacks, 3. Latinos and other immigrants, legal or not, 4. unions and government workers.

If you are a White man who makes his own money, I can tell you, bro, you are the absolute last guy they are gonna stand up for and the first one they'll (continue to) throw under the bus.

If you are a self-supporting Pale Male and you still vote for Democrats, ask yourself:

Current polls show that 94% of Blacks will vote for Barack Hussein Obama. The reason that this is not "racism" is that Blacks are a, probably the, Protected Sacred Victim Group* of American culture and politics.

If 94% of Whites were planning to vote for Romney & Ryan, what else could that be but proof positive of rank and unadulterated racism?

All discourse around "racism" serves only one purpose: to keep Whites in line with the liberal project of their cultural, legal, moral, demographic and monetary dispossession. That is all there is to it. Nothing more.

As Burnham's Law points out, a society infected with liberalism is morally disarmed when faced with any group which liberals perceive to be less well off than liberals. The outcome is that such a society will be in utter thrall to and eventually under the control of its most restive and disruptive minorities.

Liberalism is indeed the ideology of societal suicide.

Only White states are liberal. If there are any non-White countries run on liberal values, --and not just UN-style fakery--I'd like to know what they are. No one but Whites would be morally blind enough to follow a set of untethered "values" that took their own tribe over a cliff.

Liberals --and religious ones are the worst-- are fond of saying things like "The measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable members." That's true, but not in the way they mean. Because a huge percentage of those encompassed by that pious phrase are its most dysfunctional, draining and irreformable, a society that becomes obsessed with "its most vulnerable members" has lost its sanity

Monday, August 20, 2012

It has not only been post-Catholic liberals who have been disappointed by the Roman Church after the Second Vatican Council, but traditionalist Catholics as well. The most notable schism from the Right has been the Society of St Pius X, founded by Msr. Lefebvre. They have been in talks with the Vatican over the last years, to see if they can be re-integrated.

The discussions have all been intellectual and very pointed. The break was about ideas, doctrine. Theologians from both sides meet and read each other's documents and talk them through. Of course there is feeling involved, but the medium of dialogue is ideas. The constitutive triadic unity of Catholicism (and Orthodoxy) consists of hierarchy, sacraments, and ideas, that is, doctrine.

The LCWR, IMHO, if it were as honest about its ideas as the SSPX, would also be in schism, if not worse. Luther was more Catholic than they are. But it has taken an entirely different tack. The dominant form of discourse I have read from them has been moral and emotional. The unofficial abbess of the Church of Social Justice & EcoFeminism, Joan Chittister, expressed her pain at being "observed", not being seen fully by these men, as a person, spoken "to" rather than "with". Their meeting with overseer Archbishop Sartain was about (note the adjectives) "mutual respect, careful listening and open dialogue." Covering up their obvious departure from Roman Catholicism, they have made this loaded dialogue about them (ie, their collective ego/persona) and their feelings. Read this article and ask yourself what its content is. It's all about an emotional processing that they are convinced will vindicate them.

Why the diff?

Boyz vs ghyrls.

I have no doubt that there is a lot of feeling and personal hurt and anger on the SSPX side, but the dialogue is between males and is straightforwardly intellectual. Doctrine is the issue. And I have no doubt that there is a lot of ideology on the LCWR side, --oceans of verbiage, in fact--but the female dialogue is emotional. You are not teaching the correct idea vs You don't see me as a good and equal person.

Feminism is astonishingly overloaded with ideology. Unlike the intangible Father God whose Word was made flesh, their fleshy Gaia Goddess is obsessed with making words. But at bottom, in most cases, it is a typically female form of argument --animus-possessed, as Jung would call it,* where a thin but high-volume covering of intellectual half-truths hides what is entirely a feeling-based assault. It's what makes men insane when trying to reason with an angry woman.

Sunday, August 19, 2012

I am not a fan of grand conspiracy theories. Not because I think people are too good for that, but because I think people aren't smart enough for it. It requires too much unity of purpose, intelligence and stability.

On some of the blogs I have been reading of late, there is a definite theme of conspiracy, especially around a particular ethnic group. Not a new idea. Some of the results that these blogs point are pretty easily observable fact; the motivations and mechanisms require a larger leap of faith, IMHO.

I don't at all doubt that certain ethnic groups --well, all human groups, when you get right down to it-- have predictable behaviors, attitudes and beliefs which tend to eventuate in predictable outcomes. It's called culture.

I suspect it is more a matter of culture rather than plotting: a group's relatively stable set of beliefs, skills and aptitudes, attitudes and values, and behaviors. Cultures can change, and markedly so, sometimes very rapidly. But the fact that we notice the change only testifies to a previous stability. Which tends to produce similar results.

Take two desolate islands, Iceland and the Falklands, and compare them to two tropical islands, Haiti and Madagascar. Might the cultures of the people living there have something to do with their conditions? Was it rude of me to notice that?

Culture functions just as effectively as conspiracy. Or even more basically, as Fred says, "Don’t look for a conspiracy when human nature is an adequate explanation."

Funny how multiculturalism, which is supposedly conscious of cultural differences, also forbids consciousness of cultural differences that do not fit the Primary Narrative of oppressors and victims. PC giveth and PC taketh away.

We are not allowed to note the consistent outcomes for spaces or institutions where Blacks become either demographically or politically dominant.

We are not allowed to note the disproportionate participation of Jews in government, education and the arts, science, law and medicine, business and finance, entertainment and media and the typical outcomes associated with this over-representation. (They are 2% of the population.)

We are not allowed to note the disproportionate influence of gays in certain spheres, including political ones, and the outcomes on traditional values and institutions. Etc.

[If by some freakish Time Machine, AmerIndians were infected with PC in the 18th/19th centuries, they'd have been prohibited from noticing that wherever White settlers showed up on their borders, sooner or later they (the Indians) would be dispossessed.]

Mitt Romney got in trouble recently by telling Israelis --a society dominated by Ashkenazi, ie European, Jews-- that it was their culture that enabled them to thrive. By comparison, the surrounding Arab sea remains backward and unimpressive. He was accused of racism, of course. But it's as clear as day that the combination of race and culture makes a huge difference there.

On the one hand, this means a Zionist conspiracy to keep the whole Arab world in the shabby state it's in (barring oil wealth, its only source of value and power)*. Or it might just mean that a people who combine a deep sense of specialness, extraordinarily high IQs, Western educations and values, and a sense of urgency, among other things, is likely to outpace a fatalist, tribal society with a fate-driven religion and a propensity for self-destructive resentment...and conspiracy theories.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

It is universal liberal consensus that Tibet should be free and independent...which means that the Chinese need to leave, so the Tibetans --who are an ethnic group--can reconstitute themselves, their language, culture, religion. So why is it so terrible --racist and intolerant--when citizens of other states want to live with their own people in their own country...with their own language, culture and religion, etc....which means that unless given permission, foreigners and aliens need to leave?

If, rather than invading with an army and taking control of the government, tens of millions of Chinese had illegally immigrated into the country...would that change things? Would there be a hue and cry for the Dalai Lama to grant them citizenship, make Tibet a bi-lingual bi-cultural country, provide free education to them, and forbid native Tibetans from objecting to their presence?

It is now cultural dogma that "hate" (or the tiresome gay version, H8) is always wrong, bad and evil. Inexcusable and to be repressed entirely. Hate is the new Lust. Being call a "hater" is another way of instantly invalidating you. (It's like "racist".)

But wishing doesn't make it so. All human emotions make sense, whether you like them or not. And none of them are going away.

One of the fuels that drives hatred is a sense of being under threat. One of the kinds of people or groups or ideas we hate is what threatens us.*

Part of the campaign against hate is a desire to prevent certain groups from noticing or, worse, asserting that they are threatened.

Some threats are fantasied or overdone. Many threats are absolutely real. Paranoia, like so many mental dis-orders, is really just a natural and normal state gone rogue.

Hate often makes sense. And if you disallow that emotion in others, you will never get to understand why they hate you. It's not just because they are bad or defective (though they may be) but because they perceive you as a threat to something they value.

And you very well may be.

It might be instructive to lay down your defensiveness and investigate. Not to make friends or surrender, but to figure out what and how your enemy is thinking. Isn't Sun Tzu supposed to be cool right now?

The outcome of this may not be Kumbaya moral equivalence and Star Trek one-worldism**. You may decide that you are a threat and that's just fine with you. In a world well characterized by John Kekes as full of "scarcity, flaw and contingency", being a threat to someone is well nigh inescapeable. Mother Nature made the rules long before you were born.

So if you find yourself (personally or as a group) hated by someone, ask yourself why...and be prepared to find an answer other than that you are an innocent and blameless object of mindless and irrational hate. Hate often has a clear mind and a functioning reason. But with different interests from yours.

If you are gay, or a Jew, or White, or a Muslim, or Black, or an illegal immigrant, or Republican, poke around a little and some more reality may come your way.

If you really ask Why Do They Hate Us, there's usually an answer.

*Perhaps this is a source of the Christian prohibition of hatred, a recognition that it is rooted in fear. If the Christian religion is true, then a believer cannot be truly, that is, ultimately, threatened by anything human. So there are no grounds for fear, and hence, for hatred of any human.

**Although very entertaining, Star Trek is the epitome of liberal dishonesty. Positing an end to poverty and war and tribalism on earth, through mere technological means that eliminate scarcity, (which it imagined as the source of flaw and contingency), it had to project the drama of violence and competition out onto the galaxy. Otherwise, there'd be no script. They don't call it science-fiction for nothin'.

I have long had the thought that Christianity is a good religious basis for a civilization IF people don't take it literally. Medieval Christianity was grafted onto a Germanic barbarian culture which, like the Roman one it replaced, was patriarchal and realistic. It lived by blood, soil and violence. The Christian knight embodies the balance.

The Christian monk shows the safety-valve: take the serious practitioners and wall them off where they can't do any harm. Recently I found a discussion at a righty site which said much the same thing: to function societally, Christianity needs to be in tension with a powerful non-Christian force. Otherwise its unreal otherworldliness is destructive. Was it ever possible to imagine social utopias before Christianity?

But there is a difference between a natural non-Christian force and a derivative post-Christian force. Secular liberalism is definitely not a healthy counterbalance to Christianity. It is in fact a kind of denatured Christianity, all morals and the fanaticism of universalist pretensions, without the essential limiting factors of a recognizable God and a dense doctrine and mythology, a cancerous utopianism without the religious barrier between this always-fallen world and the only heavenly next. When, as now, it is ascendant, it does not balance Christianity but infects it and dismantles it.

The English Dominicans' site shows the problem:

The book of Ruth offers, then, a rich commentary on the difficulties that surround doing what is right in a world twisted by ethnic, economic and gender inequality. Yet when we view this book in the context of the whole canon of scripture, a deeper significance emerges. Matthew's gospel includes Boaz and Ruth in the genealogy of Christ himself. Even in the midst, then, of the moral ambiguities and struggles that arise in situations that have been complicated by sin, God is still able to further his plan of salvation. Ruth the Moabitess, the pagan, in desperation married Boaz and became a member of God's people at least partly through a kind of sexual coercion. She herself would no doubt have admitted that this is not the ideal way to go about finding a husband, yet God used this marriage to prepare his people for the coming of his Son the bridegroom. For Ruth, entry into the people of God was fraught with risk and humiliation. For us it is a gift, the fruit of Christ's marriage to the Church. Ruth had to stoop low to enter the promise, we must not ask the vulnerable of our own society to do the same.

The assumption that universal equality is across-the-board the natural and desirable condition. The feminist reduction of this story to sex abuse. Talking in the voice of a proprietor/participant/debtor of "our own society" about "the vulnerable" who must not be asked "to stoop low".

The assumptions are pure liberal progressivism, not Christian tradition.

One of the hardest things in therapy is to help the patient realize the extent to which the problem he is complaining about is of his own design and to take responsibility for his part in it.

Another thought: might there be some connection between this phenomenon and a community where children are raised by women, without the men who biologically fathered them --and who are not uncommonly more than one man?

What must generations of young men feel when they look around and realize that their fathers did not care enough about them to stay and raise them? Any clue?

And when they look for direction, what does their Hip Hop culture all around them tell them?

And then let your gaze range afar, outside the US, to any country where Blacks predominate and ask about the prevalence of this kind of thing...

Friday, August 17, 2012

I was roundly castigated the other day for an impolitic comment I made at a site for gay conservatives. Two fellas, a Canadian and an Australian, found my attitudes "despicable". This was because I advocated looking at the behaviors of groups rather than individuals. That, I was told, was "leftist", "unnecessary" and "low road."

As much as I appreciate the libertarian sense for the primacy of the individual and his freedom as a contribution to conservatism, it suffers from the general libertarian flaw of being too theoretical for the real world and ideologically blind to the massive power of groups in human life: the role of culture and the human drive for group status.

Even the Great Man theory of history assumes that these Great Men have the loyalty or at least cooperation of groups. No dictator can function without his gang. Otherwise he's just a solitary crank, like Ex Cathedra.

To further annoy my critics, I sent them a little blurb about Karl Marx's theory of mystification. I learned about this in seminary. Yes, indeed, in seminary. ( Marx was not wrong about everything. As my cranky old Russian Orthodox professor admitted, religion is the opium of the people.)

Marx used the concept of mystification to mean a plausible misrepresentation of what is going on (process) or what is being done (praxis) in the service of the interests of one socioeconomic class (the exploiters) over or against another class (the exploited). By representing forms of exploitation as forms of benevolence, the exploiters bemuse the exploited into feeling at one with their exploiters, or into feeling gratitude for (unrealized by them) their exploitation, and, not least, into feeling bad or mad even to think of rebellion.

If you look at race in America --in the whole West, actually-- you can see that it is an exercise in mystification that goes by the name of multiculturalism and civil rights. Liberal Whites lull themselves into believing that their pious and self-congratulatory notions of brother/sisterhood and equality and color-blindness are what actually determine the shift in race discourse, law, power and status. As my definition of liberalism maintains, it is actually about replacing the traditionally dominant groups with new ones. It far closer to Zero Sum than Win Win.

The original post on the site complained that conservatives were always getting framed as racists. The reason is clear. Despite its fecklessness, the Republican Party is the only mainstream one that (covertly, no overtly) cares anything at all for the status, power and wealth of American Whites. The Democrats, even if numerically dominated by Whites, is the party of the Left, driven by anti-White multiculturalism, anti-male Feminism and anti- producer Redistributionism. It is the party of unmarried women, Blacks and Latinos, gays, Jews, union and government workers (and Asians and Muslims), all of whom vote democrat in numbers ranging from majority to massive. My point was that the Republicans were in fact the only place left in mainstream politics for White males (and their wives) who make their own money. And that group is demographically heading for minority status...which is never a good thing for a group.

I opined that since this really was a conflict --on my darker days, a war-- between the Founding Peoples and the Coalition of Victims, I was clear and conscious about where my stake lay, as a White male who makes his own money (laughably little though it be). I pointed out that in multicultural paradise, the ONLY group forbidden to be aware of itself except on its knees, is Whites: and White men particularly.

If all the other groups could be aware of, speak and act specifically in favor of, their groups, it was about time that we Whites did the same.

For this, I was cast as...oh, the pity...a racist. And as Old Joe Biden would have it, y'all know what I think of that scam.

My ethically superior pals accused me of lowering myself to the same level as liberals and leftists, "dividing" people into groups so they could be manipulated. Well, boyz, that's how the world works. The racial pacifists reminded me of people who refuse to see that, even if they are not at war with Islam, Islam is at war with them.

Monday, August 13, 2012

seem to project their Inner State on the Church, expecting it to take up all the joys of egalitarian democracy of the Democrat persuasion, while projecting their Inner Church onto the State, pulling for it to be the source of charity, morality and community. The worst of both worlds.

And while enthusiastically severing any connection between Christian doctrine and the State, these secularizing crypto-Constantinian believers nevertheless advocate for the non-religious State to enact programs and policies based on the highest forms of Christian morality*. The expect Caesar to act like God while adamantly resisting that Caesar should know anything in particular about Him.

*Christian morality in regard to wealth and resources. NOT Christian morality in regard to sex and the family. Imposing the former is "fidelity to the Gospel", while imposing the latter is "dogmatic intolerance unacceptable in a pluralistic society."

Our poor Founding Fathers didn't want the State and the Church to be linked, as they were in England. What they could not have imagined is that in America, the State itself would eventually become the State Church.

What strikes me as odd is that while reformers in the 16th century recognized that their faith was no longer compatible with the religion of the Roman Church and left to start their own bodies, proudly so, contemporary folks who find themselves inside the Roman Church but who have developed a faith even more distinct from it than Protestantism, refuse to admit that truth and leave.

The Protestant reformers and their churches were hyper-Christian: no deviation at all from the Trinity and the Incarnation --ask Servetus-- and an obsession with the Bible. Contemporary Christian and Catholic liberals are hypo-Christian when it comes to content: much more bound to universalist themes that flow from the Enlightenment and cultural Marxism than to the narrow confines of confessional and institutional churches and their sectarian and particular faiths. Take the LCWR: When you are disputing a doctrinal assessment from Rome, you invite Barbara Marx Hubbard as your keynote speaker? What could be clearer?

If you read through the years of speakers and workshops and position papers, etc of the embattled LCWR, and the websites of many of their member sisterhoods, you'd be struck --if you knew anything about 2000 years of Christianity-- about the thin, thin, thin Christology. When the Son of God gets mentioned at all, it is the romantic historical revolutionary and inclusive Jesus --basically a Jewish Martin Luther King (without the plagiarism and serial adulteries)-- or a reference to "the mission of Jesus." And when God is mentioned, it's God or The Spirit or The Ground of Our Being. Pretty generic stuff. A rightwing Unitarian could sign on to it. All designed, of course, to accomodate the real fundamental commitments of these women's groups, to eco-feminism and leftwing social activism.

As Heidegger pointed out, you can often learn more from what is Unsaid than than what is Said.

What they call old vs new "consciousness" is really Catholicism (or any kind of historically continuous Christianity) vs. Something Else.

Why don't they just man up and admit it?

PS. These wymyn are as White as any Tea Party gathering, but because they are Wymyn under attack from the Patriarchy, and belong heart and soul entire to the Democrat/Progressive camp, no news outlet has once noticed this obvious racial fact...

A character flaw can be as much a flaw as blindness in an eye or paralysis in a limb. And as debilitating. Some can be remediated, or palliated, or moderated. Some seem impervious to improvement. Character is fate, and that can be both opportunity and trap.

**

A people can change, and rapidly, for better or worse. Take the Jews. Who would have thought that Europe's pale unathletic and bookish Jews would one day provide the material for the fearsome Israeli Defense Force? Who would have thought that the people whom Churchill led through World War II would one day cringe, and punish one another, at the idea of displeasing the hordes of Muslims or Blacks who backwashed into their island? And although it took longer, the Vikings' descendants now seriously entertain the possibility that men should not pee standing up because it offends a certain female sensibility. And for the same reason, their soldiers remove the phallus from a lion rampant on a regimental shield. China: from the backward hidebound impotence of the late Empire, to the madness of Mao, to the bizarre spectacle now of a Communist country out-capitalisting the Capitalists.

Although I see little to no indication that America will stop dismantling itself culturally and demographically, I am reminded of what the great James Burnham's blind side was, a belief that what is happening now will always happen. He was a brilliant diagnostician but not an accurate prognosticator. Who could ever have imagined in the 50s and 60s that the Soviet Union would implode in the space of a few years? Back then there was every reason to believe that the Communist world would last indefinitely. It's usually only in hindsight that history's drift seems inevitable.

***

James Hillman once criticized me for using the phrase Judeo-Christian. His reason was that it sounded imperialist, a revisionist appropriation of Judaism into Christianity. My reason for using it was the opposite, that Jews did not want to be erased from their religion's role as the root of Christianity.

It is commonly used now, especially by conservatives, as a kind of inclusive honorific for the sake of Jews, who are so prominent in our country. But until quite recently, with few exceptions, the Christian religion which built the West saw itself as completely superceding Judaism. Jews played very little direct role in shaping the culture of Christian countries until after their 19th century emancipation. And their ascendancy coincided with the decline of Christianity in Europe in the 18th century.

It makes as much sense to speak of a Christo-Islamic or Judeo-Islamic tradition. It makes even more sense to speak of Helleno-Christian tradition. It may be oddly PC to call the West Judeo-Christian, but it is more accurate to say that it was built on Christianity. It was, after all, called Christendom. And who knew that better than the Jews?

Sunday, August 12, 2012

...Romney and Ryan become the new Executive for the US, that will not mean Everything Is OK. If the Democrats retain Senate control, we'll have deadlock. And suddenly it will be patriotic to be The Party of No.

But more deeply, the culture and the demographics remain problematic. And economies are hugely complex systems, hooked into global systems beyond our control.

It would mean we have time to slow down the slide a bit. But I am not assuming that it would turn the tide. Twenty five years later, what is left of the "Reagan Revolution?"

And if Obama (and Biden!) get re-elected, --which would not surprise me--then my sense will be that "America" has transmogrified into something discontinuous with its past, no longer identical. I suspect that others have felt similarly in the past. After the Lincoln Administration. Certainly after FDR's New Deal.

Barring some unexpected turn of events --and isn't that sorta the definition of turn of events?-- the Civil Cold War will continue and will get increasingly hot.

Liberty as limited government and justice as group equality are incompatible values.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Watching an Uncommon Knowledge interview with Paul Ryan. I like the man. I hope he survives the campaign as the same guy he is now.

Two white guys running for the Executive. Nice. Glad Romney didn't do race or gender pandering but chose someone focused on the economy.

***

Reading about the Groovy Nuns vs the Evil Bishops. The language each side uses is fascinating. The men are clear. The women create oceans of BS. The Roman Church, at bottom, is held together by a tri-unity of hierarchy, doctrine and sacraments reflecting the Father, the Word, the Spirit. Like it or not, never has it been anything else without also being that. These women have migrated out but refuse to acknowledge it.

The head nun said that they would not begin their "dialogue" by discussing doctrine. The nuns want to make it all about blind and deaf power-hungry old men vs their loving care for "the poor and marginalized" in "an open and honest dialogue of equals". Hey, girlfriend, doctrine --ideas-- is what this is all about, and in Catholicism, hierarchy. As in so many cases, the female feminist argument is basically emotional ad hominem. Irreconcilable opposites.

***

Read a really fascinating article about the moral, cultural and political uses of the Nazi war against the Jews. As I have long maintained, the liberal obsession with Nazism has served --purposely--to hide the even greater misery caused by Marxism, allowing the progressives to hobble the self-confidence of Western civilization. Parallel to the American historical game played when slavery and the Indians are allowed to determine the identity of the country.

A cultural narrative which places the Holocaust at the center of history, or even of Western history, can only contribute to the progressives' desire to unravel and destroy us. Just as making us believe that Blacks and Indians are the determinative centerpiece of American history can only serve a similarly destructive agenda.

No culture or civilization that allows itself to be driven by compulsively placating aggrieved minorities can long survive. In that paradigm, which unfortunately is our current paradigm, being a victim is an addictive source of power. We can never be allowed, no matter what we do, to move beyond the grievance.

On a microscale, take a couple where one of them commits adultery. If the other partner makes that event the centerpiece of the relationship forever after, it doesn't take a therapist license to predict the outcome.

Friday, August 10, 2012

Anyone who has ever read documents from the Vatican knows that it has its own special and unloveable style, derived from both imperial Latin and from Italian floridity and circumlocution. And here it would not be altogether inopportune to note, etc. The modern Anglo-Saxon love of brevity and clarity is offended by its curial verbosity.

Oddly enough, the aristocratic Vatican's populist competitors and opponents, embodied in the aging Boomer nuns of the LCWR, have developed a style which bloviates at least as much, if not more, but in a quite contemporary...and to my ears, feminine...jargon.

A short example, where members at the meeting are asked not to come to the closed sessions unless they are prepared to keep secrets:

(she) asked members who "cannot understand or perceive confidentiality as anything other than total transparency to consider not coming to the executive sessions, not in the interest of ever excluding anyone, but in creating the kind of environment we need to really discern* with each other in freedom and openness."

What kind of mind-web do people who talk like that live in? It really gives me vertigo. And then there's the presidential address, if you have the stomach for it. Makes papal encyclicals sound colloquial.

I find myself remembering, with discomfort, one of the loathsome fathers of political correctness, The Frankfurt School's Theodore Adorno, and his critique of existentialism, The Jargon of Authenticity. He asserted that a philosophical language which purported to reveal was instead a massive cover-up.

Even a broken clock...

*This word is as ubiquitous in contemporary Catholicism as diversity is in the larger world. And I loath both terms. Discern, because it reeks of Jesuits. Diversity because it's just a lie.

I got a promotional email from a gay porn site which included a clip from the Folsom Street fair. Outdoor sex. And it starred one of my favorite performers.

But, boy, was it unerotic. Anti-erotic. Maybe if the performers had been in a studio, or even a space by themselves, it would have been provoking. But no, in the street, not.

Why? The crowds of people at the Folsom Street fair would put you off sex for a long, long time. What a homely, unkempt, pathetic, depressing bunch of clowns.

They remind me of the naked guys in my Castro neighborhood, exercising their First Amendment rights to make you want to put pins in your eyes. People you would never ask to take their clothes off. As my cranky old canon law prof used to say, "Public nudity is a sin, but the reasons why it is a sin are not identical. Being naked prior to age 25 is a sin against chastity. Being naked after age 25 is a sin against charity."

Despite their puffed up ethical promise to provide data without bias, their first bit of info gives the game away:

One of the most striking findings regarding new entrants is that almost equal numbers of women have been attracted to institutes in both conferences of women religious in the U.S. in recent years. As of 2009, L.C.W.R. institutes reported 73 candidates/postulants, 117 novices and 317 sisters in temporary vows/commitment. C.M.S.W.R. institutes reported 73 candidates/postulants, 158 novices and 304 sisters in temporary vows/commitment.

The CMSWR was founded as an orthodox alternative to the much larger LCWR. 80% of US nuns are part of LCWR orders...so the number of entrants and new members, while "almost equal", is greatly disproportionate. If a group of 800 people grows by 20 and a group of 200 people grows by 20...well, you can see the difference between a 2.5% and a 10% increase. Were these Sisters not paying attention when Sister taught them math?

You don't have to have a degree in statistics to see that what is not being said makes a lot of difference. Applicable to a lot of things.

was entirely geological, botanical and zoological in the eastern Sierras on my 5-day recent trip there. The human element was extremely un-"diverse".

In the Owens Valley, Mono and Inyo counties, I saw two Black people. Everyone else around June Lake (elev 7600ft, pop 629) was White.

In the forested lake country north of Tahoe, I saw one Chinese family, from Canada; one mixed race woman, one Asian man, and aside from a Zimmerman-like "White Hispanic" bartender, the only Latinos were the cleaning women at the place we stayed. Otherwise, complete Caucasianity. And this coming weekend there's a Tea Party gathering in Graeagle (elev 4500 ft, pop 731), where we stayed.

Lotsa families, mom and dad and kids, and male/female couples.

Oh, and two young gay guys, White, in Sierra City, while I was chatting with the road crew lady, Pamela, holding the Stop sign, about how a bear tried to break into her house the night before but she run him off with her gun and her dogs...

Looked into the BAR today, SFs LGBT weekly, something I rarely do anymore.

Two headline stories caught my eye: one on gay Black men being outsizedly infected with HIV, and another on the new RC Archbishop of SF, Salvatore Cordileone.

The HIV article, of course, blamed "the country" for its failure to prevent disproportionate HIV rates among Black gay men. Of course. It could have nothing to do with the actions of the men involved. Nor could it be the decades-long refusal of Black leaders, especially churchmen, to take this issue on as theirs rather than as yet another paranoid delusion about schemes by The Man. This is the same mentality that wanted to blame Ronald Reagan for White gay men's infections in the 80's. The President made me have unsafe sex because he doesn't love me. I had some unsafe sex now and again and believe me, I was not thinking of Ronald Reagan at the time.

Since Blacks are The Archetypal Official Protected Victim Class, and gays are currently suffering from Chick Fil A's violently oppressive decision not to endore samesex marriage, "the country" must be to blame for that, too.

Do these people never tire of BS?

The second story revealed how shocked, shocked, shocked the local LGBTQ,ETC community is by the appointment of an orthodox Catholic bishop to the chair of San Francisco's Catholic Church. Really, what is the Vatican thinking? The editorial called it "cold water" and "a slap in the face" to SF.

Toward Our Future

What the sons of Europa need is a new religion: one that is as tribal, portable and survivalist as Judaism, as masculine, terrestrial and tough as Islam and as intellectually and aesthetically creative as Christianity...with a dose of the unflinching realism of the ancestral ways of the Greeks and Romans, Germans and Celts and Slavs..And for the larger Indo-European frame, something of the Indian capacity to combine an ultimate and philosophical realization of The One with a robustly mytho-poetic religion on-the-ground. Oh, and some of the psychological acumen of Buddhism.

Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo

In A Nutshell

Liberalism's Basic Flaw

Liberals believe that the chief role of the State is to force everyone to be equal, (ie, take vengeance on the successful). So when they are confronted with any group that they deem less well off than themselves, they are morally disarmed, completely and utterly. Any group that can achieve Victim Status is on their way to power and the (White) liberal's onlyjob is to give them what they want, no matter how much that damages him. And nothing may ever be expected, much less demanded, of them in return. It's a recipe for suicide: no other outcome is possible.

Demography as Destiny

"...then the end of the Roman republic was at hand, and nothing could save it. The laws were the same as they had been, but the people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted for nothing." Theodore Roosevelt, 1911

Multiculti Suicide

"Modern liberal societies in Europe and North America* celebrate their own pluralism and multiculturalism, arguing in effect that their identity is to have no identity."

Francis Fukuyama

Identity & Migration (2007)

*(White societies, that is.)

Equality's Dark Side (Oops, is that raciss?)

"“The sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced ... to a single principle.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835